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David Ellis is self described as a digital strategist, educator and broadband evangelist. He teaches in York University’s interdisciplinary Communications Studies Program and he has been writing about Canadian broadband. In particulare, he is advocating for more to be done to accelerate adoption of higher speed services.

Among his writings, he has been frustrated by provincial complacency with 100% broadband availability and my regular readers know that I share his feeling that we need to do more to get people to actually subscribe.

He had a piece through the weekend that merits discussion.

I took issue with his view that a reason to rule out satellite connectivity is that the higher latency rules out telemedicine applications.

Most of all, geostationary satellites have latencies that put them completely out of the running for important apps like telemedicine – three or four times higher than the 250 milliseconds it takes a signal to travel 22,236 miles into space and back, i.e. 900 to 1,000 milliseconds or more

Telemedicine is an imprecise name for a broad field, with a variety of requirements for broadband connectivity. Let’s be clear – most of us are not ever going to have digital imaging devices in our homes and even fewer will have a robotic scapel connected to a gigabit optical feed to allow doctors to operate from the comfort of their homes. Instead, a more immediate requirement is for telemetry type connections: vital signs, blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, blood sugar levels. Isn’t that a reasonable definition for residential telemedicine?

Until we get to pricing of home CT Scans in the order of Mr. Fusion, we need to be more realistic about the kinds of broadband speeds and latency that are really needed.

There seems to be a subtext that implicitly suggests that anything less than the types of speeds possible in an urban setting isn’t worth consideration for univeral broadband services.

This strikes me as a noble, but naive message.

There is an enormous benefit to having any form of data communications connection in a household. The leap from zero to anything greater than zero enables all sorts of efficiencies in the delivery of government and social services. Most importantly, it provides an appetizer – a taste of what being connected can do.

The next stage is moving from casual – call it dial-up – to always-on connectivity. With ‘always-on’ connections, there is the ability to push as well as pull, an ability to stay on any time, without tying up the phone line. Many applications, such as home energy monitoring, e-health, e-commerce, e-mail, need just a basic always-on connection.

We want way more than basic always-on connections, and we are going to need a variety of connectivity technologies – including next generation satellite – to enable all Canadians to derive benefits from the digital economy. There are high throughput satellites being launched early next year that will bring affordable urban speeds to every home in Canada – no matter how remote it may be.

As I have said many times before, I used satellite for the entire summer, for business and consumer purposes and it works just fine, thank-you.

The ITU released a report yesterday, A 2010 Leadership Imperative: Towards a Future Built on Broadband, that will be getting a lot of coverage over the coming week. The ITU Secretary General called for making access to high speed networks a basic civil right, a stronger statement than what appears in the official report. However, keep in mind that the ITU has a low bar for its definition of high speed service: 256 kbps, always-on connection. The ITU defines wireless, mobile broadband and satellite as all being acceptable substitutes. Canada is well beyond this hurdle for all our citizens. 

As I wrote on Friday, there needs to be a greater emphasis on broadband adoption. On that key point, I am in full agreement with Professor Ellis. Let’s hope for some action as Parliament returns for the fall session.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project provides wonderful insights into trends in broadband adoption and attitudes for our neighbours south of the border.

The 2010 Report [pdf, 2.2MB] was released last week and the headline from Engadget observed that “Pew study finds majority of Americans don’t want government to prioritize affordable broadband.”

we have to imagine researchers might have seen this coming. Those with broadband don’t need it, those without it don’t want it.

It is a telling statistic – that should concern those who are looking to build enthusiasm for national or regional digital strategies.

The US is seeing a drop-off in adoption rates now that residential broadband penetration has reached two-thirds of American adults. But policy makers need to understand what is causing the lack of support for increasing adoption to the remaining third of the population.

Digital literacy remains a concern.

A fifth of American adults (21%) do not use the internet. Many non-users think online content is not relevant to their lives and they are not confident they could use computers and navigate the web on their own.

What information can be extrapolated for Canada? Is broadband access too much of a focus, when education and skills training appear to be holding back even more users?

Can we explore similar research being conducted in Canada?

The CRTC’s public consultation to examine the next generation of basic service has gone even more public. Last week, I wrote about the proceeding in “Basic access at what cost.” The CRTC has now created a special website, complete with an introductory video, to try to solicit more input from the general public.

Over 10 years ago, the CRTC set an objective for telecommunications companies to provide Canadians in all regions with access to high-quality, reliable, and affordable basic telephone services. Today, over 99% of Canadians have basic telephone service that includes the following:

individual line local Touch‑Tone telephone service;

access to low-speed Internet at local rates;

access to the long distance network and to operator/directory assistance services;

enhanced calling features, including access to emergency services, voice message relay service, and privacy protection features; and

access to a copy of the current local telephone directory.

1. What services should be included as part of your basic telephone services today?

2. In the context of this objective, what role, if any, should the CRTC play in ensuring that all Canadians have access to broadband Internet service?

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The wireless industry has been growing steadily for many years and today all Canadians have access to wireless services. Three Canadians out of four have a cellphone and an increasing number of Canadian households are wireless-only. Also, more and more people are connecting to the Internet using wireless services (e.g. Wi-Fi, 3G networks or satellite).

3. Do you think that cellphone service can be a substitute for traditional home phone landline service? Explain why or why not.

4. Do you think that wireless services (e.g. Wi-Fi, 3G networks or satellite) can be substitutes for landline services to connect to the Internet? Explain why or why not.

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Broadband Internet access is increasingly being used for a variety of activities, for example education, health care, business, and entertainment, to name just a few.

5. For what activities do you use or expect to use your Internet service?

The attempt to have a better outreach to the public is admirable, but a couple of the questions appear to be asking the public to challenge the CRTC’s long standing policy of technical neutrality. Specifically, the third and fourth questions may indicate that the CRTC is no closer to approving Bell Canada’s deferral account proposal; having just asked the public to comment on whether wireless services can be substitutes for wireline, it would now appear to be inappropriate for the CRTC to rule on Bell’s deferral account proposal until after this consultation is concluded. As a result, the launch of broadband service for many communities has just suffered yet another set-back.

Will the website succeed in soliciting greater public participation? The irony, of course, is that the CRTC is using an internet website to get input from people on whether broadband internet access should become part of the basic service objective, among other questions. The challenge will be to understand that responses will naturally be skewed, reflecting the bias of people who already have access to broadband service.

Much has been written about the way countries other than Canada are investing billions of tax dollars upgrading telecommunications infrastructure in creative business models.

Government cash injections for information networking makes for good photo opportunities and allows politicians to show constituents how much they “get it”, all the while making references to how their teen-aged kids have so much more technological aptitude.

But looking at recent news articles, it should be apparent that we will not likely be able to deliver affordable terrestrial broadband to every household – at least not in my lifetime. And this isn’t because Canada is only investing $225M versus the A$43B (roughly C$40B) from Australia.

Two stories caught my eye last week. First was confirmation that Australia will be using satellite to finish the job of providing universal access to broadband, spending nearly a billion dollars to invest in two Ka band satellites.

The other news item was that the UK is not going to meet the aggressive timetable for universal broadband connectivity by 2012, an objective that it had set out just a few months ago.

So in Australia, tens of billions of dollars won’t get fibre to the home for everyone; satellite will connect up to 10% of their households. And in the UK, with much higher population densities, there is now a recognition that broadband connectivity isn’t as easy to accomplish as simply making an announcement.

On the other hand, we have seen the private sector in Canada investing in satellite broadband, having realized that there is no other realistic choice in the foreseeable future for many rural and remote residents.

We can continue to have parliamentary and senate committees study alternatives forever, and have armchair critics pontificate about how Canada is woefully underserved while we flush hundreds of millions of dollars trying to defy the geographic realities that define our national demographics. Or, we can be more pragmatic, and accept that not all Canadians will have the same technology powering their choices for broadband service.

Satellite works way better than dial-up for every application and it delivers a more than adequate broadband solution for almost every on-line requirement. 

In the past couple weeks, the federal government spent more than $1000 per household passed in order to make broadband available to a few select communities in BC, Alberta and Ontario.

How many households could receive lower cost satellite service if the government developed a direct user subsidy? Is it time for Canada to develop a national satellite strategy?

An article on Wall Street Journal says that it is time for RIM and Nokia to join forces in order to compete more effectively against Apple in the smart phone segment.

Apple’s iPhone 4 scored sales of 1.7M units in its opening weekend, a new record for an Apple product launch.

The WSJ article highlights Apple’s market cap of $250B towering over the market valuations for Nokia and RIM, each roughly at $30B. The article suggests that Nokia has been unable to “formulate an answer for the iPhone at the high-end, and as smartphones get more affordable for consumers, the market for low-end phones will continue to shrink.” 

I wondered if the WSJ article may be discounting the importance of the developing world in its forecast for shrinking demand for low-end phones. It is often too easy to be focussed on our own markets without keeping the rest of world in mind.

Let’s provide a little context for these numbers. The total mobile handset market in first quarter 2010 was about 323 million units, or roughly 3.5M new handsets sold every day, for the entire quarter. So, on its launch weekend, the iPhone 4 took about 15% of worldwide sales. Nokia has seen sequential declines in quarterly market share, but it still sells more than a million devices every day – with roughly a third of the global market.

It is that global reach that provides an important distinction for low end devices. Less than 5% of Nokia’s revenues from sales of devices comes from North America [Nokia’s quarterly filings]. Three quarters of Nokia’s sales volume is from outside North America and Europe. About 80% of Nokia’s sales were low end devices with an average selling price of 39 EUR.

Integrating Windows functionality into the next generation of high end Nokia devices will provide an alternative other than RIM for Nokia to engage with the corporate market. 

A bigger question is where does RIM go from here?  

Lots of questions remain in the mobile device market. Will success in doing battle with Apple in the mobile device market parallel the computer market? Is it a case of religious debates, like Mac versus PC – Windows? Will Android be a more significant spoiler than Linux has been?